Dennis is a retired Colonel living with his wife, Barbara, in Tecumseh, KS. Some of these Posts are filtered through the memory of a "not so Young Man" and you might have to utilize your built in crap detector to filter truth from memory errors. Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum. If you wish for peace, prepare for War. Our current Congress is "Stupid with zeros on the end...

12/10/2014

Social Needs

As what I think is a fairly normal person, I too have social needs that from time to time need filled. I get a lot of that done when I sing with the Barbershop Chorus but there is also a few times when I just feel the need to get out and meet with people. Today we went to mail some packages at the Post Office and met a nice young lady with two small children. Doing my best imitation of Grandpa, I talked to the kids and on the way out of the Post Office the mother stopped to talk with Barb and I. She had been a substitute teacher at Tecumseh North Elementary and she and Barb had a lot of friends in common. It was nice to stop and talk to her for a few moments. Made me wish we had offered to take them to lunch.If I was to try to aim this Post to a topic, I guess it would be how people feed their social needs? With the kids here while their bathroom gets remodeled, there is a lot of social interaction with them. With the Christmas season here, there will be family gatherings to go to. What do you do to fill that need? I am sure there are many of you that feel Church is a good place to go and meet people. Moving on to the next topic, I am always amazed at the news does its best to dramatize topics way above their real importance. Turn that around and I ask why some events don't get more attention. There are more young people killed on the streets of Chicago and Detroit on a weekend than most of the rest of the US combined. Let one young white girl in rural Oklahoma die and it gets 15 minutes of airtime. This morning Barb and I talked about how many people in the USA don't feel empowered to participate in the climb of the ladder in a career that pays a living wage. I read that a lot of employers have taken to hiring older workers who have lost their jobs to replace the kids that would have taken these starter jobs. I can relate to that when I went back to school in the fall of 1970 and my job at Safeway bagging groceries was filled by an laid off Engineer at Boeing. Being the kind of guy I was, I worked at a Salvage a couple of days a week to make do. Our needs were not that great and I did know how to work. I didn't ever go back to Safeway so I don't know how that guy fared. Most of the Boeing jobs were transferred to Seattle so I guess that guy either moved or stayed at a fairly minimal job. I hope you all can join in the discussion od how we can get our country back on track. For those young people, there were a lot of worse times in the 60's and it is possible to put it all together. It takes a lot of smart people willing to work on our problems and not run around playing gotcha.MUD